"No booze, no rough stuff," he smiled. "What can I do for you, sir?"
Mitch told him. The man hesitated. "I think you must mean Neddy, don't you, sir? Yes, I'm sure you must. Oh, no, please!" He gestured distastefully as Mitch reached for his wallet. "The gratuity must be left with the young lady."
Mitch sat down in a row of chairs with three other clients. They kept looking at one another and looking away again. As they were permitted to ascend the stairs, other men were coming through the entrance tunnel, each greeted with a frisk and a singsonged, "No booze, no rough stuff…"
At last the man at the desk smiled and nodded at Mitch. Mitch started up the stairs, and the man said that Neddy could be found at the first door on his right.
"A preferred room, sir. And a very special young lady."
"Thank you," Mitch mumbled.
He was getting the Class-A treatment, he guessed. He was a more likely-looking customer than they usually got, and they wanted him back.
At the head of the stairs, he paused and drew a long shuddery breath. Then, he opened the muslin-covered screen door on his right and went in.
He was hardly breathing; unable to breathe. Nervously, he caught the door, letting it close without a sound. He dragged his eyes to the bed, made himself look and almost shouted with relief.
The girl was lying on her stomach, head pillowed on her arms. In the subdued light, her naked body was a shadow carved of ivory. A beautiful but vaguely limned shadow. It was only a little more clear to him than her face.
But he could see her hair, hair that by no stretch of the imagination could be Teddy's. A long page-boy bob trailing to her shoulders-and black! Coal black.
Fine beads of sweat broke out on Mitch's forehead. He was relieved, oh, God, was he relieved, but what the hell did he do now?
Obviously, he couldn't do what a patron was expected to do. But what was the alternative? What would this girl think or do, and what about that guy downstairs with the baseball bat?
He didn't know what would be an acceptable course of conduct. Almost as far back as he could remember, he had been hearing about places like this in the frankest detail. But he had never been in one. He didn't know what a customer who wasn't a customer was supposed to do.
Looking for a way out, some clue to getting off the hook, he let his eyes rove the room.
On the mirrorless dresser stood a white crockery water pitcher and a washbowl of the same color and material. Conveniently nearby was a small cardboard box of purplish disinfectant; the so-called snakebite remedy, soluble crystals of potassium permanganate. The washbowl was tinged with traces of purple. There were also smudges of purple on the towels which half-filled the basket at the side of the dresser.
In addition to a chair, and of course the bed, there was one other item of furniture. A large white chamber-pot. It was about half full like the towel basket-what could be more logical?-and its yellowish contents were also veined with the purple of potassium permanganate.
A well-run place. A house with a social conscience.
Mitch's lips quirked in a nervous smile. The smile began to spread. Then, the girl turned over on the bed. She sat up and stared at him.
She was a very wholesome-looking girl, with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. The change in her appearance wrought by the black page-boy wig was incredible.
Mitch gulped. His emotions locked on the delicate gear between comedy and tragedy, the hideous and the hilarious. Then, there was a kind of inward back-thrust, the "kick" of a mechanism that had built up more compression than it was meant to handle. And he began to laugh.
He laughed as though his life depended upon laughing well, as, in a sense, it did. He was still laughing, laughing and weeping, when Teddy got up and slugged him with the piss pot.
10
The major was waiting, studying Mitch with a mixture of malice and-and what? Envy? Hunger? Mitch's mind raced, trying to probe the other man's soul and brain. Meanwhile, the major felt forced to speak.
"A very fine young man, Samuel. I am truly sorry that he will not be able to continue here."
"Why won't he?" Mitch said.
"Oh, now really, Mr. Corley. This is a very select school, as you know. To have a student whose mother is a, uh-uh- well, you must see that it's impossible."
"Why? The semester will be ended in less than three months. Just why can't he remain here for that length of time?"
The major's mouth worked wordlessly, a man trying to explain the axiomatic. At last, with a helpless gesture, he placed the matter in purely practical terms. Yet his visitor remained unimpressed.
"But no one knows you received this, Major. That's right, isn't it? If the question should ever arise-and it won't- there's no way to prove that you received it."
"But-but I know, Mr. Corley. I, uh, know and my duty is painfully clear."
Mitch said that he didn't see it that way at all, and he was sure that the major wouldn't if he thought things through. The major's first duty was toward his students. And how could duty be interpreted as the punishment of a student for the wrong-doing of a parent?
"You're a man of the world, Major; I can see that. I'll bet you've had a fling or two yourself, haven't you?" Mitch smiled engagingly. "A man right in his prime as you are can still enjoy a juicy taste of life. He knows what life's about. There are certain rules to observe, of course, but he certainly isn't going to embarrass someone like myself, another man of the world, because of a youthful mistake."
The major coughed. His swollen flesh shifted inside the tan uniform, straightening and readjusting its mass, trying to remold itself into some semblance of the trim figure that sat across the desk.
"As you say, Mr. Corley-huh-huh. These things do happen to the very best of us fellers. Oh, yes, huh-huh. There was a girl in the Philippines-" He broke off in sudden alarm. "Now, Mr. Corley! I really can't see-"
"No one knows about this." Mitch said steadily. "No one but you and I. There's not a reason in the world why anyone else has to know it."
"But-but what are you suggesting?"
"I can't enter Sam in another school at this late date. If he's forced to leave here, he'll lose an entire semester's work. Now, I was reading an article the other day on the cash value of an education to a boy. I don't remember what the overall figure was, but I think that if you broke it down a semester would be worth about… two thousand dollars?"
The major stared at him dazedly. He looked down at the band that was being held out to him, heard Mitch murmur that he'd have to be running along. The major shook the hand and withdrew his own palm. Felt the flat-folded crispness that was like no other feeling.
It was done, then, so easily and smoothly; a gracious thing that could only be undone ungraciously. He wobbled upright on his wretched legs, hardly at all discomfited, the benefactor rather than the benefacted, seeking the words appropriate to one man of the world when addressing another.